By Clara Esparza.
Corina Tulbure migrated to Barcelona from Romania in 2001, with a great lack of knowledge about the reality of migrants and the bureaucratic obstacles they often face. After this experience, Corina worked as a freelance journalist and researcher, always putting the issue of migration at the center of her concerns.
What year did you migrate to Catalonia and why? How would you define your migration experience?
I migrated in 2001, out of love and because I wanted to continue studying in Barcelona. At that time I was just over twenty years old and I didn’t know much about the world, given that I had never lived in any other foreign country before, so I didn’t know anything about migrating, the Aliens Act, all the existing bureaucratic obstacles… I discovered all this as I tried to make my life in Barcelona.
I was completely unaware of this reality, which is the migration system, and which is not only a social reality, but also an individual one (since it affects the collective level and each individual). I didn’t know or understand how it worked either. Remember that we are talking about 2001, when Romania was not yet part of the EU and, moreover, between 2001 and 2004 was the period of migration of many people from Romania to Spain, so there was a lot of stigma towards this group of migrants.
When you experience this for the first time, the first thing you feel is that you don’t understand anything, you wonder why it’s happening to you, what you did wrong, but then you enter a phase where you see that these are processes that repeat themselves, that it happens to them to many people and you realize that it is a systematic thing. I remember that when I was 20 years old, when I left Romania, I did not attach any importance to the passport, I discovered the weight of the passport while living in Barcelona. Then I discovered all the administrative and social categories, such as the status of “migrant”.
I have never understood its real meaning and I don’t know when one starts or stops being a “migrant”, especially nowadays, when there is a lot of mobility (many times forced and sometimes imposed) and when the virtual world makes every once again our imagination and our desires.
In your doctorate you studied the role that emotionality plays in immigration management, that is to say, the behavior of institutions and the application of objectivity when implementing inclusion programs. What could you tell us about this supposed inclusivity and parity behind the bureaucratic processes and inclusion programs? Is this so in reality?
I came to migration studies after experiencing it first-hand, in a way, and because I wanted to understand how a whole assembly that I had discovered when I arrived in Spain, what is called the migration regime, worked. What happened in this meeting between a bureaucrat-official who works for the state (in any type of program or institution, from the Foreign Office, to the police, social and mediation services) and a person who does not have the papers, who from the administrative point of view is not recognized as a citizen, who has rights, but who is not recognized. I am referring to people in “irregular administrative situation”. This encounter between the official and the person without papers, a bureaucratic encounter, says a lot about how rights are accessed.
Looking at it coldly, it is a meeting between two people who do not know each other, have never seen each other in their lives, but in which one person has the power to decide on the life of the other.
Afterwards, I also wondered how it was possible for people who were precisely critical of immigration policies to end up acting within a system that enforces them. These were not far-right sympathizers with anti-migration speeches. I observed that they were actually very compassionate people, who were aware of the negative effects of their work but who ended up being part of a repressive gear towards migrants: “The banality of evil”, to quote Hannah Arendt .
I also discovered how emotions play a definite role in the enforcement of laws, protocols, etc. From the outside, a certain objectivity, monotony, application of rationality is assumed, but the reality is that, in practice, this is not the case for nothing, there is a lot of arbitrariness and emotions greatly influence the decision-making processes.
Meeting in Tunisia with relatives of the disappeared. Photo Roger Grasas
During the years 2012-2018 you worked as a freelance journalist, both nationally and internationally. Could you tell us about your background?
I started in 2012 to cover immigration issues because I realized that it was a very invisible reality for the rest of the population and that many painful stories were repeated, which had a systemic nature.
Firstly, I was covering the subject of migrations in Spain: the problems with documents and borders, always as a freelancer. In 2016 I went to Turkey to cover the arrival of Syrian refugees in the country and the war in Syria.
Before going to Turkey in 2015, I had covered the arrival of refugees on the Balkan route, passing through countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Germany and refugee camps, following the route taken by the migrants.
After this period of international movement and covering displacement and borders, I began to cover political and social issues, related to migration in Eastern Europe, moving from one country to another (Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Kosovo). There was this idea that, coming from Romania, I would understand it better, although I didn’t think so, because every country is different and has a very important history and language difference.
It was a time in which I met fantastic people and I really enjoyed being close to people’s stories and experiences, which is what journalism gives you. For me, moreover, it was a time of liberation from the stigma of the “migrant woman”. I was carrying a card from the Association of Journalists of Catalonia and many people asked me if I was Spanish, to which I answered yes, even though my passport was Romanian. Sometimes, I asked myself if it was right to lie to them, but the reality is that I spent half my life in Barcelona. I find it curious to cling to a place, when what gives us the most sense of belonging are the relationships we have, the people we love, not the places.
From that period, I feel very grateful to some editors and media who trusted me, not only because I stopped seeing myself as a migrant, but because I felt that people trusted what I was doing.
How would you describe your experience as a female journalist in such a masculinized world, especially at that time, what was international and border journalism like?
Even if it seems like a paradox, access to conflict or post-conflict zones was easier for me due to the fact that I am a woman. Maybe my age, or the fact that I was a freelancer, meant that I got permissions and access to different groups or people, I think I was too naive to pose a threat.
However, as a woman, and especially as a freelance journalist, you experience a permanent tension because you are often alone in places and only count on people’s hospitality or kindness. There is no protection of any kind in this regard, neither physically nor logistically, and the economic precariousness of female freelance journalists is added to this.
In this sense, for me, the camaraderie and friendship with the local journalists were fundamental to feeling more secure and being able to work.
Recently, with the Associació Institut de les Desigulatts, with which you collaborate as a researcher, you have carried out a study on the memory and recognition of migrant women’s activism in Catalonia, with a review from the 80s to day of today Why do you think it is important to incorporate these struggles into the historical memory of Catalonia?
The idea of talking about the memory of migrations arose when re-reading news about migrations from 20 years ago, those of 2001, precisely when I arrived in Catalonia. I noticed that the same language was used, the same stereotypes. The facts, the location were different, but the narrative was similar.
At that moment, I thought about the 20 years that I have attended or participated in different mobilisations, meetings, projects that have to do with the rights of migrants and that’s when I asked myself where all that was, what it was all about .
We started interviews with activists who arrived in Catalonia in the 70s, or even earlier, to collect their testimonies. It is a part of the history of Catalonia that is very little known, even less recognized, but the legacy of this past is present in our day to day, in the rights that have been achieved. In this sense, from the Institute of Inequalities, extensive work has been done to rescue these witnesses from oblivion and open this debate on the need for a migrant memory and above all for the social and institutional recognition of these struggles
I think that we could not understand our current society without incorporating the memory of migrations, both the forms of activism that have existed and their legacy, as well as the migration control institutions that have existed for decades and that continue existing, such as CIEs and deportation flights for people who have lived here for years.
Days of the Institute of Inequalities with the Association Terre pour Tous. Photo Mireia Comas
At the same time, you do great work with relatives of missing people in the Mediterranean, supporting the Tunisian organization Terre pour Tous. What can you tell us about this problem, still so invisible today?
For two years, the Institute has been working together with groups of Tunisian activists and with the relatives of the disappeared to report situations of violence at the borders, as well as to find out what has happened to their loved ones.
Here it is seen as just another piece of news, but in Tunisia there is collective mourning, as every family knows someone who has been a victim of the borders. Border violence is very present among all people.
How do we explain that for decades we have known about the existence of shipwrecks and have the images in mind but they still continue to happen?
It is contradictory to claim a defense of human rights when we witness the death of people at sea and there is no opening of legal channels. In other words, it’s not that we don’t know, but that there is a dehumanization of people in motion that has been going on for decades and that means that, even if the shipwrecks are seen on the screen, people don’t react en masse. I have never seen mass demonstrations against migration policies and we are talking about more than 27 000 dead, just if we take the official numbers into account.
